Over the course of the last few years… I was so focused on building a profitable business that I almost let it consume me. One way to get a huge dose of reality is to experience the death of a close family member… for me it was my father.
You will hear things like this from others… but you will never know what it is like to experience it until it happens to you. My father was a tobacco auctioneer and was one of the best in the world at his profession. In a way a lot of the different paths I’ve taken in my own life was to make my father proud and be the best at what I was doing… just as he was the best at what he did in his life.
My father was always like a rock of the family who kept things going and did things no one else wanted to do. From mowing the lawn… to keeping all the vehicles that my family has had over the years running well… to whatever else was needed. Although my father may have said in the past “Boy why don’t you cut that hair”… he never once stood in my way and always supported me in any hobby or career choice that I was making at the time.
When I was a kid playing little league baseball… I wanted to be a pro baseball player & my Dad would be at all the practices helping out the team. When I was a teenager I wanted to be a pro freestyle BMX rider & my Dad would be out in the yard helping me build ramps to ride on. When I got into music… my Dad would help me buy any music equipment that I thought I needed… let me borrow his truck to haul it and my band around to any gigs we had scheduled… and help me unload everything no matter what time of the night it was when we got home.
Sometimes you take things like that for granted because that is the way your life has always been…
Sometimes you get so focused in your career that you don’t even realize what is going on right in front of your eyes. When my father started suffering from liver problems over the course of the last year… I still saw my Dad sitting there although other members of my family would tell me how bad he was doing health wise. Of course… if I asked my Dad how he was doing he would always say “I’m going to be all right… son”.
My father was in and out of the hospital from Christmas of 2008 on into March of 2009. He died in early March at Duke Hospital in Durham… NC just weeks before my fiancé and myself were to be married.
